The Race

propeller begin to blur as they spun toward top speed with a powerful-sounding Blat! Blat! Blat! He had never felt a motor spin so smoothly. At twelve hundred rpms, it ran slick as a turbine.

He glanced down at Andy.

“Ready!”

Andy nodded agreement and signaled the mechanicians to pull the chocks and run alongside to steady the wings in case of a crosswind. The Eagle began to roll, bouncing on pneumatic tires that were connected to the chassis’s skids with springy bands of rubber, and swiftly picked up speed. The wing runners dropped behind. Bell felt a smooth, muscular impulse as the tail lifted from the ground.

He had a hundred yards of open space ahead of him before the grass ended at the rail that separated the infield from the racetrack. He could blip the magneto button to slow the motor so he could practice rolling on the ground. Or he could pull back on the wheel and try the air.

Isaac Bell pulled back on the wheel and tried the air.

In a heartbeat, the Eagle stopped bouncing. The grass was five feet under him. Unlike trains and autos that shook as they went faster, when the machine left the ground Bell felt like it was floating on glassy water. But he was not floating. He was hurtling straight at the white wooden rail that separated the field from the racetrack.

He was barely off the ground. His wheels would not clear it. He tugged a little harder on the wheel to go higher. Too hard. He felt the machine tip upward sharply. In the next instant, he felt a sudden void open up under him, and the Eagle started to fall.

He had been in comparable fixes in autos and motorcycles, and even on boats and horseback.

The solution was always the same.

Stop thinking.

He allowed his hands to ease the wheel forward a hair. He felt a shove from below. The propeller bit the air. Suddenly the railing was safely below his wheels, and the sky looked immense.

A pylon was suddenly standing in front of him, one of the hundred-foot-tall racecourse markers around which they timed the speed trials. Just as Andy and Josephine had warned him, the gyroscopic force exerted by the spinning weight of the rotary engine had dragged him to the right. Bell turned the wheel to the left. The Eagle rolled sideways and drifted left. He straightened up, banked too far right, compensated again, compensated repeatedly, and gradually worked her onto an even keel.

It was like sailing, he realized in a flash of insight that made everything clearer. Even though he had to counteract the engine pull, the Eagle would point where he wanted it to as long as he knew where the wind was coming from. The wind – the air – was his to use, keeping in mind that, with his propeller pulling him through the air, most of the wind he encountered he was producing himself.

He drew back on the wheel to climb. The same principle seemed to hold. He climbed in stages, stepping into the sky as if going up stairs, leveling off when it felt too slow, angling up when he picked up speed. Speed made air stronger, Josephine had told him.

Belmont Park grew small beneath him, as if he were gazing through the wrong end of a telescope. Farms and villages spread below. To his left he saw the deep dark blue of the Atlantic Ocean. Smoke ahead and scores and scores of converging rail and trolley tracks pointed toward New York City.

A rational thought rambled through his mind, surprising him. He let go of the wheel with one hand to pull his watch chain. He tugged his gold watch from its pocket and deftly thumbed it open. It had occurred to him that this was so much fun that he had better check the time. Andy Moser had poured enough gas and castor oil into the tanks to run the motor for an hour. All by himself, in the middle of the sky, Isaac Bell laughed out loud. He had a strong feeling that he had changed his life forever and might never return to earth.

“A BANDAGE,” said Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin, applying one to Isaac Bell’s forehead, “tends to unsettle my wife less than an open wound. I imagine you’ll find the same holds true with your fiancee.”

“It’s just a scratch,” said Bell. “My poor flying machine suffered a lot worse.”

“Only your wheels and skids,” said the baronet. “Your chassis seems intact, although I must say your mechanician appears put out.”

Bell glanced at Andy Moser, who was stalking circles around the machine and shouting at his helper. Eddison-Sydney-Martin stepped back to survey his handiwork.

“All done, and the bleeding has stopped. In fact, by the look of you, I expect you’re more in need of courage for reporting to your fiancee than when you took to the air. Be brave, old chap. I’m told Miss Morgan is a remarkable woman.”

Bell drove to the Garden City Hotel to meet Marion, who was arriving from San Francisco that afternoon. The instant he walked into the hotel he knew that Marion was there ahead of him. Gentlemen seated in the lobby were staring over the tops of unread newspapers, bellboys eager to be summoned were lined up like tin soldiers, and the Palm Court maitre d’ was personally pouring Marion’s tea.

Bell paused a moment to gaze upon the tall, willowy blond beauty of thirty who had taken his heart. She was still in her traveling clothes, an ankle-length pleated mauve skirt with a matching vest and high-collared blouse cinched at her narrow waist and a stylish hat with a high crown and down-swept brim. Her coral-sea green eyes outshone the emerald engagement ring on her finger.

Bell swept her into his arms and kissed her. “I have never seen you looking lovelier.”

“Fisticuffs?” she inquired of the bandage.

“My first flying lesson. I discovered an aeronautical phenomenon called ground effect, which made bringing the Eagle back down to earth something of a challenge. Andy and his helper will be up half the night fixing the wheels.”

“Was your instructor put out?”

Bell squared his broad shoulders. “Actually,” he admitted, “I taught myself.”

Marion raised one exquisite eyebrow and regarded him with the collected gaze of a woman who had graduated with the first class at Stanford Law School and worked in banking before flourishing in the new trade of moving pictures. She said, “I understand that Orville and Wilbur Wright learned the same way. Of course, they were busy inventing the aeroplane.”

“I had the advantage of advice from seasoned aviators. . You are regarding me with a strange look.”

“Your eyes are as bright as I’ve ever seen them, and you’re grinning ear to ear. You look like you’re still flying.”

Isaac Bell laughed. “I suppose I am. I suppose I always will be. Though what you’re seeing at the moment is also the effect of being so very happy to see you.”

“I am overjoyed to see you, too, my dear, and glad of a ‘love effect.’ It’s been too long.” She stood up from her chair.

“What are you doing?”

“I am standing up to kiss you again.”

Bell kissed her back until she said, “The house detective will be coming over to ask what we’re doing in public.”

“No worry there,” said Bell. “The Garden City Hotel just signed a contract with Van Dorn Protective Services. Our man took over house detective duties this very morning.”

“So,” she said, sitting back down, “tell me about the bump on your noggin. And this ‘ground effect.’”

“Ground effect prevents you from alighting when a cushion of air develops between your wings and the ground. Air turns out to be strong – stronger than you’d imagine. Essentially, the machine does not want to stop flying, and you have to somehow persuade it – like when a horse takes the bit in its teeth.”

“A flying horse,” Marion remarked.

“Apparently the effect is strongest on a monoplane because-”

“You must tell me,” Marion interrupted, “what did you see when you were up there?”

“Speed looks different in the air. The land didn’t appear to blur as it does beside a train or my Locomobile. It seemed to flow under me, more slowly the higher I went.”

“How high did you go?”